An Angry but Patriotic Retort

This post is meant as an “honorable” and “patriotic” reply to all the liberal bloggers and PTH-likes who cast doubt on popular nationalist narratives, and point out the nationalistic ideology steeped in hatred and revulsion against foreign powers as self defeating. The post had its genesis in Raza Raja’s article titled “The Misplaced Hatred and Our Rational Self Interest”[i], but is also applicable to all articles calling for restraining our patriotic fervor when it comes to drones, Blackwater, and now Raymond Davis.

(AZW)

Hold on right there you so called liberal Pakistani bloggers:

Are you suggesting here is that Pakistan is in a mess here because of America? Do you not think it was Americans, not us who were pursuing the ideas of strategic depth by backing every rabid extremist like Hikmatyaar, Haqqani and finally the Taliban?

Are you suggesting here that America did not pull out all of non Jews out of the World Trade Center and killed 3,000 of its own on 9/11 so that it can attack a third world country like Afghanistan and control its natural resources? You see, I believed in a version of this story for so long, gulping down every ultra left wing documentary that was produced to show that the US of evil A planned the whole massacre in the center of its financial center, its Pentagon headquarters (hold on, that was a fake, Pentagon never suffered any damage, or did it? OK, whatever did or did not happen, I do not care. It was all an evil conspiracy by the USA to attack Afghanistan, the country at the bottom of the world).

And you are suggesting here as well that Taliban would have been just fine if US had not meddled in Afghanistan. Or maybe you are telling us that there was no extremism problem that was killing thousands of Shias in Pakistan, or that Madrassah graduates were not steeped in the Jihad ideology for the past 25 years. I sincerely believe that Pakistan would have been just fine; the Al-Qaedas and their militant counterparts would have happily targeted only the West and would have spared the brotherly Pakistan in the name of Islam. But for that you have to prove that it were not Jihadis who were targeting the West, but was another Western conspiracy. And also, as I have stated before, I doubt that all the attacks in the West over the past 9 years, including September 11 attack were planned by the Taliban and their militant cohorts.

And how dare you suggest that we forsake our honor. Weren’t we gung-ho about Blackwater with its nefarious designs, the founder Eric Prince went on to face charges by a Grand Jury in the US and can be found these days found providing not so glamorous protection to oil tankers in the Red Sea from Somali pirates. These cowboys are using Pakistan as hunting grounds, and no matter whatever a rational self-interest means, my country cannot be dishonored. No one comes to my country even though our foreign policies, our support for supra-state militias, and extremism has run roughshod in the nation. But my honor is desecrated at the first sign of wherever the United States of America appears. I would love to not have any aid at all from that nation, but the moment I do that my budget deficit will become unsustainable, the economy would crash and hyperinflation will be around the corner. But I will eat grass, rather than compromise on my honor. Of course when I will be eating grass, USA will be the culprit, once again. All of that of maybe would have not been because of the US, but though I run out of villains to blame, though maybe it was my country’s misplaced nationalism that got it into this mess, as it did in 1971, in 2000s. America is the bloody bully of the world and I will keep hating it with every ounce of my strength.

I was all up in arms against the Kerry-Luger Bill that wanted to give my country 1.50BB dollars yearly, mainly promoting civilian institutions and setting benchmarks to see if the money was properly distributed or not. It felt good lambasting that damned country that was giving aid to ostensibly strengthen the law and order institutions. I felt good talking without an ounce of proof that Blackwater is running amok in our nation and that the hired killers are loose in Pakistan. It means little to me that an Islamic Emirate of Waziristan is functioning inside my geographical boundaries, sending suicide bombers of ripe ages into my streets and across the world. That my country is unable to deal with them decisively, that it only acts when the militants overrun Swat, Bajaur, and Buner is beside the point. But then when the US targets the same militants using unmanned drones, I am all worried that my geographical sanctity is violated. See for more than a decade, you accused my geographical sanctity to be violated when people went out of the country to kill others. No Sir, for me it is far more troubling when the USofA comes in to target those killers. See they are invading our lands, and killing our people, even if those ones targeted by the drones want to take over my country and shape it in the form of a medieval regressive woman-hating, anti-knowledge and anti-arts so-called Islamic nation.

It does not matter that if my country’s policy makers were not asleep at the wheel, the problem would have been nipped in its infancy. I would rather not looking at civilian casualties (I still do not know the exact number when our forces went after the bad guys in Swat and Bajaur, but those civilian casualties do not matter) when our forces would have invaded South and North Waziristan. I hate any sort of this analysis, because analysis is secondary to my honour and geographical sanctity. But then we were making the glorious pacts with the exact same militants between 2003 to 2006. You see, I was protesting at the top of my voice that Pakistan should stop any operations in Wana and Bajaur back in the early 2000s, and do not do anything against our brethren, our very own. See I was welcoming those pacts that many like you and Ahmad Rashid were pointing out were set to fail. Sure the Pakistani Taliban regrouped and went after us with a vengeance, but it was the Jewish-Hindu conspiracy to destabilize Pakistan. Weren’t those Taliban thought to be uncircumcised Hindu men, posing as Islamic glorious warriors?? See Mr. Liberal Blogger, your rational self interest may find an audience in a few thousand souls at PTH; but the theories I believe in, are analyzed, dissected and embraced by the hundreds of millions of Pakistanis across the nation.

And now I believe Pakistani Taliban are different from Afghan Taliban, hence I fully support my country’s dual policy to protect its strategic assets when the US leaves town. My latest motto: Afghan Taliban good, Pakistani Taliban bad. And that shall remain the case, against any rational discourse that you may want to plead with me. I will rather keep Afghanistan destabilized than to have a puppet (democratic, huh, sham…) government of US being firmly in control (which to my eternal discomfort is becoming quite chummy with India).

So now I will blame India for the Baloch unrest, the same way I blamed them for the Bengali unrest. I will blame the USA for keeping Pakistan destabilized, even though you may keep pointing out that none of my internal insatibilty had cause other than the false, undefined and shifting Pakistani nationalism that keeps my country focused on external threat, while the country threatens to break apart at seams.

And what if I was dead wrong all that time? What the hell man? It does not matter. You may call my nationalistic identity steeped deep in religiosity confusing. But I do not care. Now I have this Raymond Davis piñata to smack. I think he is a dangerous CIA operative on a secret mission in Pakistan. And I think you liberals are nothing but American ass-lickers who are trying to cool down my patriotism in the guise of common sense. I see that you want courts to decide his immunity fate. I see that you give him a benefit of doubt, but do not also want to declare him a murderer just now. I do not care if those two dead guys were indeed hell-bent upon robbing him. I even don’t understand why that American decided to kill them in the first place in broad daylight on a busy street. Do not worry; I will come up with another theory to satisfy my emotions and the desecration of my honour. You may want to proclaim that the simplest stories are usually the most plausible, that he was being robbed and being a US consulate personnel operating in a country teeming with extremists, he acted in a rather extreme way. Or you may still want to give him this benefit of the doubt in court, provided he doesn’t enjoy blanket immunity. But for me, here is the verdict; and I love seeing this verdict repeated on our popular channels 24/7. That those people are dead, that they are heroes to me now. Davis is a spy, a shady characters trolling our streets and I don’t care if he acted in self-defense or not, or whether if he could possibly have diplomatic immunity. Davis is a cold-blooded murderer who went on to murder those two alleged robbers on the streets of Lahore. The truth is what my emotions dictate to me right now. I have been at this emotional nationalist chanting for a long time, and I have millions like me on the streets of Pakistan, protesting and burning effigies. Your lectures of rational discourse can do little to change me. So damn you and your liberal blog, thankfully with only a few thousand readers. And when my nationalist chanting and short-term vision will get me into another cul-de-sac, thankfully there will be the piñata of the United States of bullying America for me to smack, yet again.